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A Tiny Fossilized Treasure

On July 23, 2005, amateur paleontologist Tony Morris was looking for fossils with friends in a part of Oklahoma where a mining operation had uncovered a wealth of fossil fragments. He found a piece of rock with a jaw sticking out of it. Could there be more of the skull of this creature inside the r…

On July 23, 2005, amateur paleontologist Tony Morris was looking for fossils with friends in a part of Oklahoma where a mining operation had uncovered a wealth of fossil fragments. He found a piece of rock with a jaw sticking out of it. Could there be more of the skull of this creature inside the rock?

Morris spent a month meticulously scraping away the rock and eventually revealed the skull of a small lizard-like creature. According to
NewsOk, Morris then
contacted University of Toronto paleontologist Robert Reisz about it.

Now, Reisz has concluded that the skull represents a new species, an amphibian related to the genus
Cacops. This species of big-headed vertebrate looked like a cross between a frog and a lizard and lived about 280 million years ago, before the dinosaurs in the Permian period. Reisz is working on a paper on the find.

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About Brian Switek

Brian Switek is a freelance science writer specializing in evolution, paleontology, and natural history. He blogs regularly for Scientific American.